


Unfashioned Creatures

by ConstanceComment



Series: Valvert Gift Exchange [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Animal Metaphors, Based On Existing Literary Scholarship, Blood and Gore, Fear Is A Perfectly Adequate Threat Response, Gen, Horror, I'm Sorry Victor Hugo, If you only read one work by me, Madeleine Era, Non-Linear Narrative, Paris Era, Rampant Classism, Slurs, Valvert Gift Exchange, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 10:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was funny, the things that didn't change.</p><p>Prompt 60 in the Valvert Gift Exchange's third round.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfashioned Creatures

**Author's Note:**

> A word of warning on language use in here: it was too good of a pun to pass up, but I still did use bitch as a gendered slur more than once for Madame Thénardier. Apologies in advance because that’s not exactly kosher.
> 
> Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this prompt? Do you? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for something that will let me go “Hugo’s constant wolf = criminal actions/mentality metaphors mean that the way he racializes the criminal state could easily be read as a literal werewolf analogy?" Because the answer is invariably a ridiculously long time, like immediately after I wrote Carnaval and got my hands on a copy of the brick and realized exactly how many opportunities I'd missed. So on that note. Wolves. Literally wolves. Everyone is literally wolves. Except for the parts when they’re metaphorically human, every character on stage right now for the purposes of this fic is a wolf. Literally.
> 
> For [newbrawler](http://newbrawler.tumblr.com/) in the third round of the Valvert Gift Exchange, [prompt 60]().
> 
> Title stolen wholesale out of Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_.

There are signs by which a wolf can be recognized. Some are more apocryphal in nature than others; one cannot, for example, force a wolf to change from man to beast by splashing him with holy water, or forcing him to cross a church’s threshold line.

But why bother with tricks like these when the ways to tell can be so easy? Most wolves have known starvation; they look at people and they hunger. Most wolves have known the prisons; watch their feet and know that they are limping, that their legs remember shapes other than human. Why bother with wards of silver when a frightened wolf will sprout fur along his hands and neck, why bother with the threat of fire when you’d see them instead shy closer to it, spurred by the fear that the heat might not last?

There are, of course, steps that one can take to hide the nature of their affliction. Valjean has taken all of these. Perfumes, to mask the scent that others of his kind might recognize. The careful filing down and maintenance of his claws so that they look nothing unlike human fingers. The regulation of his gait, to make sure that his step is human, does not drag behind him as if he is used to four feet, all of them in chains. By this and countless other methods has Valjean kept himself secret, though most potent in his arsenal is his self-control.

Where others would embrace their nature, Valjean has wholly rejected it, save for when it suits him to draw upon his more criminal or animal skills and senses. Having experienced life as a monster, as the sort of scum that not even a dog would allow to sleep in its lodgings, he has learned to be almost entirely human once more, though some of his childhood ability to be no more than mortal is lost to him forever.

Jean Valjean is a man of many regrets. Well accustomed to hardship and lies, it would perhaps, be fair to say that he has done his best to be the woodsman, and not the wolf. Still, his body gives him away.

There is only so much fear a man can live with until it becomes him.

* * *

Valjean knows that he’s walking into a den of wolves from the moment that Fabantou opens the door for him. There are signs by which such a thing can be revealed, if one cares to look, more easily revealed by those who share the curse between them. Further, these people are poor. Their poverty is almost a stench about them, and the poor often are inclined to dens.

Valjean knows better than most the things that grow and fester in dark places. Prison tends to make animals of men, and crime tends to be a lingering affliction. As such he does not hold their state against them; how could he, when it is one he shares? He is not a man inclined to expect the worst from others. His paranoia is something he barely acknowledges, and tends only towards specific things.

Such as the fact that the door hinges are greased, well enough that he can nearly smell the iron of the machine they would have been intended for.

In a strange way (or maybe not so strange at all given the company it houses) Gorbeau reminds him of prison. The ceilings are low and the walls are sodden, the smells of humanity pounding in on animal senses, mingling with the low cries of those unhappy hiding in the dark. Valjean prefers to think that he used to live here because it is cheap, and because he had thought that no one would look seriously for him here. He tells himself that he only left due to his discovery by Javert, and that is likely the more accurate statement of the two. Only in dreams will Valjean allow himself to even contemplate the horror of a possible truth, that this is where his wolf lives, that this is the den that (almost) feels like home. That, more than anything else, is what sets his all too human teeth on edge.

Valjean bends under the sagging doorframe. The snow in Paris lately has been oppressive, though not the cold. Stepping out of the wet isn’t much of an accomplishment when the tenements are soaking as well, the oppressive feeling of _people_ in all their teeming masses doing nothing to alleviate the claustrophobia of this city and its inclement weather. Valjean trades the chill wind for the stifling press of a place that’s been lived in, the indoor air filled with the breaths of what feels like so many other people.

“Where is your daughter?” Valjean asks his host as they descend the stairs to Jondrette’s room.

“Not here,” Fabantou shrugs, unlocking the door to his place. “She’s very ill, you know.” The man is still raggedly dressed, but there’s something of the costume to him now. Valjean doesn’t like the way he smells, but he dislikes most fragrances, a wolf’s nose not built for the city life.

“You did say her wound was dangerous,” Valjean agrees tentatively, and steps into the room after his host.

“It really is, and a nasty one, too. It was seeping, this morning. Her sister, dear child that she is, took her to the hospital to get it dressed.” Valjean looks at him skeptically, and the performer only shrugs again, spreading his dirty palms open in a sweeping gesture. “You’ll be meeting them later,” he assures him, “I expect them back shortly enough.”

“Mm,” Valjean hums, looking about the room. A broken chair, a smashed window, broken recently if the shards of glass and the meager drifts of snow along the floor and sill mean anything. A pile of what looks like metal scrap. Valjean can’t see any food, but that doesn’t mean much if they’re really living hand to mouth the way that they said they were.

In the corner is the wife, that giant of a woman, sitting on what appears to be one of the only two working chairs in the room. The woman smiles at him and a shudder passes through Valjean at the sight of her teeth, blackened as they are.

“I thought you said your wife was ill,” Valjean says, turning to the performer, looking out the corner of his eye to the wife.

“She is,” Fabantou agrees. “But a strong woman, my darling is. More like an ox than a human being, and fit as twenty when she wants to be.”

The woman simpers, besotted with her husband. “You always flatter me, Jondrette.”

“Jondrette?” Valjean asks, turning the full way around to look suspiciously at the performer. “I thought your name was Fabantou.” A chill creeps under Valjean’s collar, and the hair on the back of his neck coarsens into fur, rising up in white needles that scratch the fabric of his clothes.

“I can rightly be called both,” Jondrette says quickly. “Either works when Jondrette is my stage name.”

At Valjean’s disbelieving look, Jondrette launches into a soliloquy. Its nature spans that of reality, and that of the life of the poor. He waxes as eloquently as he wants to, this actor of a man, but Valjean is watching his face. His expression is much too calm for the meandering way he speaks, and it sets Valjean on edge, though he is careful not to show it.

He knows he is in danger, but he knows, also, that letting his fear take hold of him would surely be as disastrous as letting his anger free. Both emotions summon the same monster, one that Valjean has no great wish to become. He holds tight to himself as best he can, slipping internally into a place where he is as cold as the wind that drifts through the window into the room’s overcrowded furnace. Slowly, as Jondrette continues to speak, the fur on his captive audience’s neck subsides.

A man walks in. His feet are light upon the ground, and thanks to the oil that Valjean smelled earlier, his entrance through the door is soundless. But a wolf’s ears are better than a man’s, and Valjean can hear the stranger breathing, can smell the sweat on his skin before he so much as sets foot in the room.

Having a confirmation of his suspicions only settles his nerves. Valjean forces his fur to lie flat beneath his clothes, and watches as three more strangers filed into the room. All their faces were blackened with soot, and all their arms bare; a few wore tattoos, and none of them had shoes, even in this weather. Not that they’d be needed with paws like that, claws apparent enough at the ends of their legs.

 _‘Wolves,’_ Valjean thinks, and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is right.

* * *

There are ugly, twisted things that grow and fester in dark places. Jean Valjean is intimately familiar with some of them.

Prison makes an animal of men. Starvation, too, and crime, and ignorance. Those on high look down and shudder at the signs of it, the way that the poor degrade in their alleys and their crumbling homes. Valjean has heard these defamations, has seen them uttered first hand from behind shielding hands, declarations put out in a semblance of confidence by the rich to the mayor.

“Oh, monsieur, but you know about the bitches down by the docks, don’t you?” They would say, had said. “Always, you hear about them, howling at night and peddling their wares.”

“A shame,” Madeleine would agree, had agreed, “a shame that they would be pushed to such extremes and succumb to them.”

It was not a stance that made him popular, not among the rich, nor among the smallfolk, what with the way that the bottom of society’s class structure was that most saturated with wolves. The mayor quickly gained the reputation for being soft on them, which of course would mean that he was soft on crime. To remedy this, a new police officer was sent up from the south, one who was known for his self-control, and his dedication.

 _Let the mayor try to be soft on crime now,_ the thought must have been, _with that one there in his township._

It is in this manner that Madeleine met Javert.

* * *

The men who have entered Jondrette’s appartment do nothing to mask the signs of their affliction, not hiding the gait of their loping steps, not even attempting to cover the fur on their arms. One leans on the wall as if to fall asleep, and even though he slits his eyelids, beneath the paint on his face Valjean sees a wolf’s yellow irises. It’s an intimidation tactic, showing how they’ve simply grown comfortable in these halfway skins. It marks them as more dangerous than the common criminal, the common animal.

The very thought is something abominable to him, to meet men so near to being beasts. Finding people like this has always been something revolting to Valjean. How, how could someone be so at ease in a skin that wasn’t theirs? How could they so openly wear their danger, so easily be at peace with the monsters inside their blackened hearts?

“Pay them no mind,” Jondrette tells Valjean, and without his voice to fill it, a hush has fallen in the room. “They are furnacemen; they are dirty because they do dirty work. They are simply other men who live in the house with us. They are friends of mine,” Jondrette assures him, though it is nothing of the sort. “You could almost call us a pack, how close we are.”

“That much is readily apparent,” Valjean admits.

The room is quiet now, without Jondrette’s incessant noise to fill it. Valjean does his best to count the heartbeats of those around him, but he must be wrong, to hear more hearts than he can smell or see. He thinks, for a moment, that he recognizes the scent of that young idiot he’s been misleading through Paris lately; it would be the perfect kind of farce for that idiot boy to have followed him here.

“I have a picture to sell you,” Jondrette says, his movement towards Valjean drawing him out of his bitter musings.

At a signal from her husband, the actor’s wife rises from her chair. The only thing about the motion that is graceful is the way her many shawls fall around her in a swirl of faded color. Without her voluminous rags to cover her, it’s clear the kind of bitch she is, from her padded feet to her bristling tail. Her arms are cords of muscle under poorly-groomed fur; it is clear that she has no need for grace with a power like that.

From a decrepit shelf hanging from the wall, she takes a piece of wood, wiping some dust from its face before handing it to her husband. He thanks her with a pet name and a smile, the same that has not at any point left his face. The wife stands behind her master, and waits, the same as the rest of the gang in the room. For certainly, this pack is that. This here is a den of thieves.

“This is the sign from an old inn,” Valjean tells the man when Jondrette shows him the picture, and feels the truth sink in his belly like lead. “It’s only worth three francs, if that much.”

Jondrette, or rather, Thénardier nods and steps lightly into an arm’s reach of Valjean, who is himself in the throes of the realization that he has once again become prey.

“Do you have your wallet on you?” The cur asks him softly. “This will cost you about a thousand crowns.”

“You didn’t think you could hide, did you? Someone like you?” The thief shakes his head, though Valjean only glares. “A wolf like you?” He continues, tapping his snout. “The nose knows its own, you know.”

Despite himself, Valjean growls, and in this, finally gives himself away.

* * *

Inspector Javert isn’t someone that Madeleine would have preferred to associate with. While an impeccable officer, the man is certainly offputting. Even despite the fact that the criminal the mayor has long suppressed wants to fight or fly the moment it catches so much as a whiff of the inspector, Javert is an unsettling character. With a dry humor and an all-consuming devotion to the law, the man seems more like a particularly ugly statue than a human being.

Though it is quite easy to tell that the man is not human; while he walks with the assurance of someone who has never been in chains, hides his ears beneath his hat and rarely has occasion to smile and show his jagged teeth, Javert’s eyes give him away despite that. When the inspector looks at the mayor, he does so full on, and there is nothing human about his eyes. Javert’s face is flat like a dog’s, and his sideburns are unkempt patches of fur rather than true human hair, his queue long and coarse from where it descends from beneath his hat. His hands, whenever they are free from his gloves, are plainly clawed.

Madeleine cannot be at ease when the inspector is near. It is a constant effort to make the hair on the back of his neck lie flat. He is struck by conflicting instincts; he wants to rip Javert to shreds to keep himself safe, he wants to run as fast as he can to avoid the danger. Instead, he invites the man into his workplace, does his duty the way he should as a superior to a new subordinate.

Javert does not stop looking at him, and his eyes are silver, such that they burn whenever Madeleine is forced to meet them.

The inspector makes no pretenses about his inhumanity, or of his origins; Madeleine reads the first few sentences of his letter of introduction (sent ahead before the man himself) and finds that his new chief of police is the son of criminals, and as such tainted by their curse. One he sees the portion where Javert discloses that he began his life and career in the same prison, Madeleine can no longer bring himself to keep reading, Valjean and the wolf rearing their ugly heads inside him.

Worst of all, though, is the pride. Where Madeleine has always hated that which lives inside him, Javert has made peace with it, one as plain and terrible as the sun. Javert cares not about his humanity, or his monstrosity. He exists, happily, between both states. The perversity of it drives Madeleine nearly to madness.

Sometimes he wonders if Javert was born human, or a wolf. Madeleine thinks it may not matter, in the end, for it is clear, in a strange way, just which one side of himself Javert has chosen, and prefers.

* * *

“You know who I am, don’t you?” Thénardier asks idly as his pack moves to the set of iron tools left in the corner.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” Valjean lies, watching the door as three more men enter it.

“I’m Thénardier!” The thief hisses. At Valjean’s perfectly blank look, he springs back from the bed, and begins to pace. “Now do you know me?”

“No more than before,” Valjean upholds. With careful steps, he puts the room’s one table between himself and Thénardier’s pack.

“Like hell you don’t,” Thénardier accuses him. “You stole a worker from me,” he expounds. “In that same yellow coat, even, one Christmas Eve you sauntered in dressed like an animal and took that Lark brat right out from under our noses. Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize you? That I wouldn’t recognize someone so wealthy and conniving as you?” He drawls, clearly fuming, the hair on his arms beginning to thickening, peeking out from under the cuffs of his coat.

“You seem to be under some sort of delusion,” Valjean insists. Eyes on Thénardier, he continues to circle the table. At his back, Valjean can feel the wind, and the crisp cold through the window.

Thénardier laughs. “You’re sticking to that, then?” The thief mutters, peering at him suspiciously. “You really want me to believe that you have no idea who I am, hm?”

“Nonsense,” Valjean replies. “I have a perfectly good idea of what you are; a scoundrel.”

“A scoundrel!” Thénardier screeches. “Damn but you’re not in a position to be throwing around names like that! Have you got anything else to say before my friends go to work on you? That money of yours is going to be ours one way or another.”

Valjean says not a word. Instead, he launches himself for freedom, just as a ninth man walks through the door, a poleaxe in his clawed hands.

* * *

Inspector Javert develops the habit of making his reports to Madeleine personally, a practice that the mayor cannot find a way to rebuff without arousing suspicion or garnering the inspector’s personal dislike. It is clear enough already Javert does not trust him for one reason or another, and Madeleine would prefer not to give him any more ammunition towards suspicion, no matter how discomfited the man makes him.

Whenever he reports, he does so perfunctorily. The inspector’s memory is excellent, and Madeleine has seen him recite entire sequences of casework without prompting, recalling with ease details that would have escaped a lesser man, showing off in full his animalistic senses and their utility in policework.

“You hide nothing,” Madeleine asks Javert after a moment like this. “Not your heritage, not your nature. Most are ashamed of their affliction, and yet you wear yours with pride. Why?”

Javert looks at him for a moment, then to the space behind where the mayor stands, his inhuman gaze fixed upon the blank factory walls.

“There is much,” he says eventually, “to be ashamed of, when it comes to something like this. There are those who regret what they have done and what they have made themselves, there are those who despise their circumstances and do nothing to change them. Failures like that, of course they are ashamed. And those who do not hide it, often, are open because they think themselves brave, above the law.”

Javert pauses, thinking for a moment. His concentration puts Madeleine’s teeth on edge. He wants to tell the inspector to get on with it, but there is little hope of that. Javert isn’t exactly the sort of man to be rushed, Madeleine knows.

“Most people,” Javert starts again, “people who hide, that is, what they are— people like that hide their nature because they think of it _as_ something to hide. Because it is beastly to them, because they are lawbreakers, because they know that it is a sign by which those like me will know them and seek them out, to return them to the dark places they came from. I have nothing to hide, so I do not.”

Javert gestures to his collar while Madeleine watches, the leather cleanly polished and scored from stopping knives. “I can be useful, like this,” he explains. “And it doesn’t shame me to be useful. The worst would be to have the capacity to help do my work better, and choose not to because I was afraid of what others might think of me. The smallest I can do is be proper in all procedures, and follow the law as it is written.”

“So you are, ah, tamed, then?” Madeleine asks, and internally he burns with the thought of it, the wolf inside him disparaging any other of its kind that would willingly bend its neck.

“The law needs hounds as well, monsieur,” Javert tells him. “I may as well step forward to fill that void.”

* * *

The minute he tries to leap through the window, Valjean finds himself immediately grabbed. Two sets of claws in his hair and three more taking hold of his torso and clothes. His coat develops more than a few tears, as does his skin, but Valjean merely bares his teeth, struggling to be free under the grip of so many.

“Tie him to the bed!” Thénardier command from somewhere behind him. “And don’t hurt him!”

Without undue care, Valjean finds himself thrown on the bed. Thénardier’s wife still has her claws tight in his hair and leaves them there until her husband tells her to release.

“You’ll rip your shawl,” he tells her. The wife merely growls, low in her throat without human speech, irritated but obedient nonetheless.

“Now monsieur,” Thénardier begins, visibly drawing his humanity back around himself like a mask, his fur receding in act of will from his arms and his cheeks. “Now monsieur, I can’t help but notice; through all this fracas, you haven’t uttered so much as a single cry. Not a single shout for help, not a sound of pain. Who is it that you don’t want to find us, hm? The police, I think,” he continues, a shrewd expression breaking over his angular face. “A kidnapper like you _would_ be anxious to stay out of reach of the law.”

Valjean snarls silently, teeth bared and beginning to grow sharp. Even mentioning the police sets him on edge in a moment like this. Thénardier is more right than he knows, but far from the truth, still. Untying his arm, Thénardier makes Valjean write out a letter to the daughter he denies even now, giving an address for the thief’s wife to follow.

It takes half an hour for the message to be revealed as false, and in that time, Valjean is not idle. By the time the bitch returns to the den with news of his duplicity, Valjean has used the watch spring inside a hollowed out coin he kept in his sleeve to cut himself free of most of his bindings.

“You need the touch of a woman on this!” Thénardier’s wife is declaring. “You’re too smart for this, darling mine; you should have hurt him right away until he spoke! Slit his throat now and be done with it.”

On this note, Valjean leaps up, unsteady on his feet but ready to run nonetheless. It is not his own life that he fears for, here, but his daughter’s. He would rather die than expose her, and would live at all costs to see her well cared for.

“You poor fools,” he rumbles, and cannot help the menace that creeps into his tone. “My life isn’t worth much for its own sake in terms of defending. You need fear me no more than I you; what harm could you possibly do to me? I have more control in my one hand than the whole of you have in this room. You think that this is a matter of strength? Of who here has the longest claws?”

Valjean grabs one of the metal scraps from where it had fallen into the fire, his weathered hands grasping the cool end of the rod.

With this, he presses the heated end of the rod into his human flesh, the metal still dancing somewhat with the last traces of flame. A hiss goes out in the room, air drawn through elongated teeth in a gasp of disgusted surprise as the room fills with the scent of burning flesh and charring meat as his skin turns black and awful, crackling under the intensity of that pain, blood hissing as iron meets itself.

“There is nothing,” Valjean says, though is world is filled with fire and pain, “that you may threaten me with such that I will yield to your insanity.”

Thénardier is the first to recover. “Grab him,” he commands, almost lazy with it, the ease with which he is obeyed.

* * *

“You do me a dishonor, monsieur le maire,” Javert says to him. Each word sounds pained as it leaves him, and he will not look Madeleine in the eye.

“How so?” The mayor asks. “If anything, I’d say I am sparing your honor, not to have you dismissed.”

Javert shakes his head. “No,” he tells Madeleine. “No, sir, you do not, to keep me on like this. To give me special treatment where I would give none to myself, where I would expect none to be given to anyone. I have wronged you, my superior,” he insists, “I should therefore be summarily let go.”

“What?” Madeleine asks, and cannot help but be sharp with the man. “You would have me send you back to your old precinct with your tail between your legs?”

There is something wholly unappealing about the inspector in this state. Madeleine is wary of the man, certainly, but it is far worse to have him baring his neck this way, to watch him try not to fidget where he stands. The more Javert begs, the more tempted Madeleine is to have him dismissed, to keep himself safe, but— he will not consign an innocent man to death because of his own fear.

“Quite literally, sir,” Javert assures him, and still he looks down at the floor. “I don’t deserve a collar like this around my neck if I can’t serve my masters faithfully.”

At these words, Madeleine feels sick, and Valjean inside him, too. “Javert—”

“You’ve been good to me,” the inspector interrupts him, heat finally entering his tone. “You’ve treated me with fairness more so than I deserve, to be as I am. Most would not; most would have sent me back like the insult I was intended to be, the dog for the mayor too fond of wolves. And when I insult you, when I make accusations of the worst sort about your humanity and your legal status, _when I am wrong—_ ” Javert sucks air between his teeth, his canines lengthened into fangs that crowd his mouth and stop the words.

Javert finally looks up at him, and Madeleine can see the inhumanity of those eyes. They still burn, and the curse has always shied from fire.

“You should dismiss me, monsieur le maire,” Javert insists, nearly wringing his hat between his clawed and hairy hands.

“I will not,” Madeleine says forcefully. “You are a good man, Javert, I will not stand for this.”

“I am not only a man monsieur,” Javert reminds him. He is almost gentle with that; he sounds wretched. He is not someone who was made with the capacity to be gentle, and he wears his attempt poorly.

“And I do not care,” Madeleine snaps, and that is the end of it despite the multitude of Valjean’s lies, and the guilt that eats through his stomach like so much silver.

* * *

“Wait,” Thénardier commands, a change coming over his face while Valjean struggles against his assailants. “Do you smell that?”

“What, the blood?” The pretty wolf asks. “Or do you mean the charred meat? You’d almost think we’re in the meatpacking district, the way it smells in here.”

“No,” Thénardier presses, “under that, you pansy of an idiot. Like gunpowder, a bit, and steel—” his eyes go wide as his ears flick towards the doors, listening hard for a sound.

On the floor, there falls a piece of rubbish. Around it, tied with a piece of string, is some sort of message.

“Police,” Thénardier mouths, picking up the thing. “Police! We’ve been had!” He shouts, and scrambles for the window, leaving Valjean behind.

Immediately a commotion breaks out, every other wolf in the pack attempting to do the same. They shove, kicking and biting like the animals they are on their way to what just might be freedom.

“You idiots!” Thénardier screeches. “We’re all going to have to go out that window, and standing around won’t make it any faster! Would you like to draw straws?” He asks, frantic acid spitting on his words.

A draft from the door. In blows a familiar scent, one that fixes Valjean where he lies, frozen in his painful place where been thrown down near the hearth. It’s funny, in a way, the things that don’t change. Javert walks into the room, and something in Valjean sits up and takes notice, getting ready to run even when he’s still got one foot in a trap.

“Would you like to borrow my hat?” He asks the criminals. In one motion he removes it, showing his furred ears for all to see. Under his smile, a collar. The gleam to the leather is a proud one, obviously symbolic of more than a knife guard.

“Shit!” Someone curses and Javert’s smile widens fractionally, at once sharper and lazier, a pit dog anticipating a fight.

And a fight there is indeed, and a brutal one at that. Javert wears a sword, still, and uses it to terrifying effect. The pack throws itself at him and Javert uses a human tool to cut them to pieces. Seeing it now, Valjean can only think of the hospital, trying his damnedest to parry vicious strikes with his claws, with pieces of wood, with his own fur-covered forearms.

Only once most of the pack is lying on the floor in tatters does Jondrette’s giant of a wife spring into action. Reaching down to the floor by her bare, furred feet, she wrenches a stone from the floor. It comes away with little fuss, and with ease she lifts the boulder above her head, ready to bring it crashing down upon Javert and his uncovered head.

“So you’re a warrior then, mistress?” Javert remarks to the giant of a woman, shoving off one of his attackers using the flat of his blade. “Protecting your husband like that?” He continues, nodding to the man cowering behind her. “You may have the strength of a man, but I have claws like a woman.”

 _‘Claws like a wolf,’_ Valjean thinks, and shudders, watching the giant clutch at the wounds that appear suddenly on her chest, trying to cover the lines of vibrant red as best she can with the torn remnants of her ornamentation. The cloth quickly turns dark as blood seeps through, and beneath his Christian concern for life, all Valjean can think is how grateful he is that the overpowering scent of blood will hide him further, clouding the senses of every monster on the building’s floor.

His wife howling before him and bleeding terribly from her breast, Thénardier finally has the presence of mind to ready his gun.

* * *

Being in chains again is like dying.

Javert puts the cuffs back around Madeleine’s wrists, and for a moment Valjean thinks he sees hate, or betrayal in those inhuman eyes, but he cannot be sure. Javert has never been easy to read, and Madeleine has never much cared to outside the most he needed to keep himself safe. Now, of course, it has all come to nothing.

“I had thought—” Javert tries, the first time he arrests Madeleine, after the hospital, after the brutality and the clawing and the desperate struggle _not to go back, never that, never, no_.

“What,” Madeleine says tiredly, hate making him unkind, making him afraid, “what was it that you _thought_ , Javert—”

“Shut up,” the inspector growls, and yanks harshly on the lead he has secured to Madeleine’s hands.

The walk to the jail is quiet from there out. There is the click of their boots on the pavement and the mud, and little else. Madeleine cannot help but think, cannot help but wonder, how many deaths they are to be party to tonight. Fantine’s, his own, certainly that little girl he promised to save. The mayor was always a lie, and he was perpetually wearing thin, but now there is little to him but paper and sound, little affectations that Valjean was always so careful to keep track of now falling away.

“I had thought,” Javert says when they reach the town jail, and Madeleine is not the only tired, angry party in this stunted failure of a conversation— “I had thought we were the same,” Javert admits. “How stupid of me,” he agrees without prompting, and Madeleine is left in silence, stunned as the cell doors shut on him once more, this time without even the grace to slam. Instead, there is only the quiet click of metal, and the sound of boots on the pavement, walking farther and farther away.

The second time Javert arrests him, he doesn’t even bother to speak, and Valjean cannot (never could) read his face.

* * *

“Traitor,” Thénardier hisses, circling Javert with his hackles raised and his claws threaded around his gun. “Wearing _that_ ,” he gestures accusingly with his chin to Javert’s neck, “like you’re proud of it. You’re a disgrace to your kind.”

Javert laughs, unconcerned, moving only as much as it takes for Thénardier not to be able to get behind him. His steps are measured, even, unconcerned. “Like there’s any honor among thieves to betray,” the inspector says. “And what are you going to do with that gun?” He asks Thénardier, tone placid but his hide twitching.

“Well, if you’d stand still,” Thénardier snaps, acid on every word, “I would shoot you with it.”

Obligingly, Javert comes to a stop. Thénardier fumbles the next step in his circle and pauses. Valjean’s heart thumps painfully in his chest—

“ _What_ ,” Thénardier starts, before laughing. “Crazy domesticated bitch!” He crows. “Standing still while I put you down!”

“You’re welcome to try,” Javert agrees. “Though, I’d be wary, if I were you, silver bullets or not.”

“Oh?” Thénardier asks, walking closer to the inspector in a straight line until his weapon is nearly level with Javert’s chest. “And why would that be?”

“Because your gun is going to misfire,” Javert tells the thief, and his voice rumbles through the room with a certainty that shakes the complacency out of the stifling walls.

Instead of responding, Thénardier merely sneers. Valjean’s heart leaps into his throat with the click of the mechanism, though even from here he can hear the muffled sound of the pin jamming.

Thénardier doesn’t even have it in himself to swear, he seems. Instead, he stares stupidly at his weapon, useless now for anything other than being applied as a bludgeoning instrument. Wisely, he throws the piece of metal aside and presents his claws, bares his teeth. On the sides of his head, his ears grow longer, grow hair, swivel backwards as he growls. Javert, for his part, does not so much as react, not to taunt, or to laugh.

Valjean saw, once, a rat try to intimidate a guard dog several times its size and infinitely better fed. He cannot say that the scene is any different now, or even that the players have changed.

Javert’s placid smile widens with the elongation of his jaw, his expression going from smile to smirk, to an animal’s hunting grin as he shrugs off his greatcoat.

“I’d run,” he growls, vertebra popping as his spine changes shape, his back hunching under the shirt he is ruining, his legs twisting. “Not that you’ll get far,” he manages, his arms dropping to the floor, breaking into new shapes with loud cracks of noise while black fur erupts over every inch of his body.

Then the capacity for speech leaves Javert entirely, his jaw and throat warped beyond anything human; there is nothing left but the wolf and the tatters of the inspector’s uniform, save the collar, which Javert always has managed to keep.

Even now, years later, Javert looks just the same. A bit more gray in the coat, of course, and certainly he looks better fed than he had the last time Valjean saw him. But the important details, the overall picture of him; that has not changed. A black wolf with piercing silver eyes, as human as they’d been before. Javert always has seemed more himself when on four legs.

* * *

The first time Madeleine sees Javert as a wolf, he isn’t Madeleine anymore.

24601 never had; they used to lock the prisoners alone in solitary for the full moon when they lost their senses, but otherwise they’d be beaten if they tried to shift overmuch anywhere in public. There was a fear, always, that as mindless wolves they’d either manage to slip their chains or choke on them. There exists a reason why wolves hate anything that resembles a collar; the common introduction to inhumanity comes with that first introduction to cold iron, steel rivets pounded into metal into slowly changing flesh.

Valjean had never taken any real notice of Javert until his release, until the man to take the collar from him wore one himself, that strip of leather like a badge of pride, clearly inhuman in his eyes and his hair and his face— Valjean knew to hate Javert long before he knew to be afraid of him, and that always had clouded their later interactions.

But the first time Valjean sees Javert as a wolf proper, the first time he finds the beast that is the man let loose, Madeleine is nothing so much as ash.

Walking into The Waterloo, Valjean had known he was walking into a den of wolves. On his way out, he had been one child richer, a thousand crowns poorer, and shaking with rage.

Walking into Javert and his ambush at Paris’s outskirts had been the last straw of his patience. At the time, Valjean considers it a miracle that he manages to avoid a complete change of shape. Instead, he merely frightens the wits out of Cosette, making her think for a moment that he is one of her former caretakers.

When Javert nearly finds them, Valjean is beyond desperate, and barely human. He hoists Cosette to a rooftop and prepares himself to jump when a howl in the alley behind him freezes him in his tracks.

Turning about, Valjean sees a wolf. Black fur, silver eyes that are far too human for a face like that and around the neck, a leather collar, the sort meant for stopping knives.

For a moment, Valjean cannot look away, and neither creature moves. Valjean does not trust his jaw to form words, and what is there to say? If there is anything between them, it lacks any proper name, and is at most, admiration destroyed and buried beneath hate and silence. Fitting that it be addressed in the way it was meant.

In the wolf’s eyes, there is a hunger, one that Valjean can recognize. He has seen it before, in the glass of a windowpane on a night with no moon, seen it in the frozen pools every morning in a winter with no food and seven children—

Valjean takes the first step back.

Javert springs upon him immediately, quick as thought and twice as vicious, jaws snapping on open air as Valjean scrambles up the wall, the claws on his hands and feet digging into the crumbling brick and mortar.

Below him, Javert begins to bark loudly, signaling for whatever men he must have brought with him. Valjean hopes that Javert’s current inarticulate shape will be enough to delay the chase and lose the scent, but he doesn’t bet on it. Ushering Cosette back into his arms, Valjean goes bounding over the Parisian skyline, running over the roofs of sleeping innocents, hoping to find refuge, desperately trying to forget those eyes.

There had been a moment, just then, where Valjean had felt the place in his ankle where Javert’s jaws would have gone straight through the bone, where he would have been dragged to the pavement by a savage beast. His skin still feels warm from the nearness of that almost-contact, and it takes longer than he would like for the sensation to subside, aching in the scar that dates back to his original chains.

* * *

Wasting no time, Valjean lifts himself from the filthy floor, doing his best to continue ignoring the pain from the horrible burn on his arm. But fear makes an animal of him; under his skin, Valjean’s bones are creaking, dying to twist themselves into digitigrade limbs. He cannot help it, he snarls at himself, to be so close to free and only now have his concentration slip!

Somewhere else in the tenement, he can hear the sounds of a fight, namely the whimpers of an animal in pain as they try to issue from a human mouth. Nearby, Valjean smells blood and his wolf howls for it, frightened and wounded and sick, more than ready to fight and kill.

But, Valjean tells himself, he is not yet trapped, not yet truly backed into a corner. There is still, of course, the window through which the robbers had debated flying. Scrambling to it, Valjean brushes the broken glass and snow aside with a bloody hand, the hair on the back matching well to the winter drifts.

The drop to the ground isn’t so terrible. Only one floor off the ground, Valjean’s made worse jumps before, though his claws had ripped through his shoes on those particular occasions. Better still, Thénardier wasn’t entirely a fool. He’d had foresight enough to leave a rope ladder hanging out the window, something to make an escape with should it be needed.

And ever does Valjean need it. Javert has apparently failed to recognize him if the way he directs one of his officers to untie “the gentleman” is an indication of anything. Valjean’s hands are still just that, human and inoffensive, though he will need to file down his nails again when he returns to a safe place. His wound he worries less about; if there is any part of his curse that could be called a gift, it would be the unnatural ability to heal. Though Valjean is bleeding and burnt, even though his skin is black and flaking away from the injury he gave to himself, he will be healed in a fortnight at most. The only parting sign from the injury will be a faint scar, if anything remains at all.

He is lucky, in a way, that he had chosen only iron for the creation of the wound: if there is one thing that the wolf cannot heal, it is silver, and the devastation it wreaks on those cursed to outward show their baser natures.

When the bishop of Digne had handed him two silver candlesticks, Valjean’s hands had burned. His skin had cracked and blistered, and his curse had made itself more than apparent.

“Be careful with those,” the bishop had admonished him while Valjean wrapped them quickly in cloth. “They are the best of what I have, my brother, and now they shall be the best of you.”

At the time, Valjean had not even had the words with which to thank him.

“There are ways,” the bishop told him, “to be more than what we are. We are all equal before our Father, my friend. If you walk in the light, there will be nothing to fear in the shadows.”

Years later, Valjean has carried his silver burden through the trials of his life, and the faint burn scars on his palms have served an excellent reminder; he is more than pain, and more than sorrow.

But Javert, with his hounding and his searching and the fear he inspires as easily as breathing—

It is hard to leave one’s past behind when the darkest parts decide quite literally to follow.

Behind him, Valjean hears a man cursing, calling out after a prisoner, for _the_ prisoner, for _the gentleman_.

“Damn!” Javert shouts, his enthusiasm still just as sick to Valjean as it had been to Madeleine. “He would have been the best of the lot of them!”

**Author's Note:**

> As stated above, this is inspired by the body of scholarly work surrounding Hugo’s use of the wolf as a signpost for criminal behaviors, patterns and activities. I have sources for that and I can look them the hell up later if you want them (and provided I can find them again), but I seem to have lost them at present because I haven’t seen them since shortly after I wrote Carnaval. 
> 
> And speaking of that story, this is, in an odd way, a direct parallel to that? It’s still Javert-the-wolf, but it’s a very different Javert, but some things are different, namely the inspiration for this take on the character. This Javert’s not totally Crowe, though I think I slipped and accidentally made him not as terrifying as he should have been.
> 
> I totally mangled the order of events in the fight scene. I pretty much did everything from when Javert entered backwards. But anyway, fucks I give, it read better narratively in this case anyway. Sorry, Hugo.
> 
> Y’all are so lucky I didn’t bust into the hard gore on the second degree burns over here. I was itching to go ham on the medical knowledge, but the prompt said to avoid that, so. Anyway, burns are gross. Like literally there’s no reason that Valjean should have been able to recover from that injury in any sort of decent way without major medical intervention as soon as he got out of there seeing as even second degree burns usually need skin grafts and present major infection risks. So of course I had to handwave that out with a supernatural healing factor; as always, bad medicine makes me twitch.


End file.
